The market for software in the U.S.

The US market for software is investigated for the period 1964 to 2000, exploring the impact of price and non-price variables on software demand. and the impact of R&D and productivity on software supply. Software sales are positively associated with advertising, they are negatively affected by a rising consumer credit to GDP ratio. and are highly responsive to disposable income. Supply has been driven by productivity improvements.

Cost effectiveness of a sugar-sweetened beverage excise tax in the U.S.

INTRODUCTION: Reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption through taxation is a promising public health response to the obesity epidemic in the U.S. This study quantifies the expected health and economic benefits of a national sugar-sweetened beverage excise tax of $0.01/ounce over 10 years. METHODS: A cohort model was used to simulate the impact of the tax on BMI. Assuming ongoing implementation and effect maintenance, quality-adjusted life-years gained and disability-adjusted life-years and healthcare costs averted were estimated over the 2015-2025 period for the 2015 U.S. POPULATION: Costs and health gains were discounted at 3% annually. Data were analyzed in 2014. RESULTS: Implementing the tax nationally would cost $51 million in the first year. The tax would reduce sugar-sweetened beverage consumption by 20% and mean BMI by 0.16 (95% uncertainty interval [UI]=0.06, 0.37) units among youth and 0.08 (95% UI=0.03, 0.20) units among adults in the second year for a cost of $3.16 (95% UI=$1.24, $8.14) per BMI unit reduced. From 2015 to 2025, the policy would avert 101,000 disability-adjusted life-years (95% UI=34,800, 249,000); gain 871,000 quality-adjusted life-years (95% UI=342,000, 2,030,000); and result in $23.6 billion (95% UI=$9.33 billion, $54.9 billion) in healthcare cost savings. The tax would generate $12.5 billion in annual revenue (95% UI=$8.92, billion, $14.1 billion). CONCLUSIONS: The proposed tax could substantially reduce BMI and healthcare expenditures and increase healthy life expectancy. Concerns regarding the potentially regressive tax may be addressed by reduced obesity disparities and progressive earmarking of tax revenue for health promotion.

Modeling the cost effectiveness of child care policy changes in the U.S.

INTRODUCTION: Child care facilities influence diet and physical activity, making them ideal obesity prevention settings. The purpose of this study is to quantify the health and economic impacts of a multi-component regulatory obesity policy intervention in licensed U.S. child care facilities. METHODS: Two-year costs and BMI changes resulting from changes in beverage, physical activity, and screen time regulations affecting a cohort of up to 6.5 million preschool-aged children attending child care facilities were estimated in 2014 using published data. A Markov cohort model simulated the intervention's impact on changes in the U.S. population from 2015 to 2025, including short-term BMI effects and 10-year healthcare expenditures. Future outcomes were discounted at 3% annually. Probabilistic sensitivity analyses simulated 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs) around outcomes. RESULTS: Regulatory changes would lead children to watch less TV, get more minutes of moderate and vigorous physical activity, and consume fewer sugar-sweetened beverages. Within the 6.5 million eligible population, national implementation could reach 3.69 million children, cost $4.82 million in the first year, and result in 0.0186 fewer BMI units (95% UI=0.00592 kg/m(2), 0.0434 kg/m(2)) per eligible child at a cost of $57.80 per BMI unit avoided. Over 10 years, these effects would result in net healthcare cost savings of $51.6 (95% UI=$14.2, $134) million. The intervention is 94.7% likely to be cost saving by 2025. CONCLUSIONS: Changing child care regulations could have a small but meaningful impact on short-term BMI at low cost. If effects are maintained for 10 years, obesity-related healthcare cost savings are likely.

Presbyterian ethos and environment in the novels of John Buchan : a religious and historical study

The aim of this thesis is to establish, from a historical and religious perspective, that the Presbyterian ethos and environment in which John Buchan was reared was the predominating influence in the writing of his novels. Presbyterianism was not the only influence on Buchan that determined the character of his stories. Buchan was by temperament a romantic, and this had considerable influence on his literature. His novels are romances, peopled by romantic figures who pursue romantic adventures. There are the signs of Buchan's romantic nature in the contents of the novels: creative imagination, sensitivity to nature, and expectations of the intrusion of other worlds, with destiny-determining events to follow. But Buchan had also an acquired classicism. His studies at Glasgow and Oxford Universities brought him in touch with a whole range of the master-pieces of classical literature, especially the works of Plato and Virgil. This discipline gave him clarity and conciseness in style, and balanced the romantic element in him, keeping his work within the bounds of reason. At the heart of Buchan's life and work, however, was his deeply religious nature and this, while influenced by romanticism and classicism, was the dominant force behind his work. Buchan did not accept in its entirety the Presbyterian doctrine conveyed to him by his father and his Church. He was moderate by temperament and shrank from excesses in religious matters, and, being a romantic, he shied away from any fixed creeds. He did embrace the fundamentals of Christianity, however, which he learned from his father and his Church, even if he did put aside the Rev. John's orthodox Calvinism. The basic Christianity which underlies all Buchan's novels has the stamp of Presbyterianism upon it, and that stamp is evident in his characters and their adventures. The expression of Christianity which Buchan embraced was the Christian Platonism of seventeenth century theologians, who taught and preached at Cambridge University, They gave prominence to the place of reason and conscience in man's search for God, They believed that reason and conscience were the ‘candle of the Lord’ which was existed every one. It was their conviction that, if that light was followed, it would lead men and women to God. They were against superstition and fanaticism in religion, against all forms of persecution for religious beliefs, and insisted that God could only be known by renouncing evil and setting oneself to live according to God’s will. This teaching Buchan received, but the stamp of his Presbyterianism was not obliterated. The basic doctrines which arose from his father's Presbyterianism and are to be found in Buchan's novels are as follows: a. the fear (or awe) of God, as life's basic religious attitude; b. the Providence of God as the ultimate determinative force in the outcome of events; c. the reality, malignity and universality of evil which must be forcefully and constantly resisted; d. the dignity of human beings in bearing God's image; e. the conviction that life has meaning and that its ultimate goal, therefore, is a spiritual one - as opposed to the accumulation of wealth, the achieving of recognition from society, and the gaining access to power; f. the necessity of challenge in life for growth and fulfilment, and the importance of fortitude in successfully meeting such challenge; g. the belief that, in the purpose of God, the weak confound the strong. These emphases of Presbyterianism are to be found in all Buchan's novels, to a greater or lesser degree. All his characters are serious people, with a moral purpose in life. Like the pilgrims of the Bible, they seek a country: true fulfilment. This quest becomes more spiritual and more dearly defined as Buchan grows in age and maturity. The progress is to be traced from his early novels, where fulfilment is sought in honour and self-approving competence, as advocated by classicism; to the novels of his middle years, where fulfilment is sought in adventures suggested by romanticism. In his final novel Sick Heart River. Buchan appears to have moved somewhat from his earlier classicism and his romanticism as the road to fulfilment. In this novel, Buchan expresses what, for him, is ultimate fulfilment: a conversion to God that produces self-sacrificing love for others. The terminally-ill Edward Leithen sets out on a romantic adventure that will enable him to die with dignity, and so, in classic style, justify his existence. He has a belief in God, but in a God who is almighty, distant and largely irrelevant to Leithen's life. In the frozen North of Canada, where he expects to find his meagre beliefs in God's absolute power confirmed by the icy majesty of mountain and plain, he finds instead God's mercy and it melts his heart. In a Christ-like way, he brings life to others through his death, believing that, through death, he will find life. There is sufficient evidence to give plausibility to the view that Buchan is describing in Leithen his own pilgrimage. If so, it means that Buchan found his way back to the fundamental experience of the Christian life, conversion, so strongly emphasised in his orthodox Presbyterianism home and Church. However, Buchan reaches this conclusion in a Christian Platonist way, through the natural world, rather than through the more orthodox pathway of Scripture.

Place of latin in the church

On the evening of Wednesday 13th September 2006, Solemn Vespers began in the historic 13th century chapel of Merton College Oxford, in much the same way as it would have done at the very first sung Vespers in this beautiful space, designed for the classical Roman liturgy already very well established in its language and forms when this chapel was first built 400 years before the English Reformation. For the next four days, the Roman liturgy, through Lauds, Solemn High Mass, Vespers and Compline, were celebrated in a place that – apart from one Novus Ordo Mass in English – had not seen the glories of this Liturgy celebrated in Latin since the mid 1500s. For those of us present at the 11th International Colloquium of the International Centre for Liturgical Studies (CIEL) dedicated to “The Genius of the Roman Liturgy: Historical Diversity and Spiritual Reach”, this was not just an incredibly moving experience, though it was certainly this, but an affirmation of the timelessness and spiritual heritage of the Latin liturgy.

Multiple regime shifts in concurring and dissenting opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court

In a previous issue of this journal, Smyth and Narayan (2004) examine structural change in the level of consensus on the High Court of Australia. In this article we adopt a similar strategy to that employed in Smyth and Narayan (2004) to estimate both the number and location of structural breaks in concurring and dissenting opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although it has commonly been believed that there has been one regime shift on the U.S. Supreme Court, corresponding to the breakdown in the consensual norm in the 1930s or 1940s, we find that there have been three breaks in consensus. We find that two of the three breaks in dissenting opinions correspond closely to the beginning of the terms of Taney and Stone as Chief Justice, with the third occurring in the middle of Chase's term. We find that two of the three breaks in concurring opinions correspond closely to the beginning of the terms of Taney and Hughes and that the third break in concurring opinions occurs in the middle of the Warren Court.

Reporting Iraq's cosmopolitan society in the Australian print media : The case of the Assyrian church bombings

A series of bomb blasts that targeted a number of Assyrian churches in Baghdad and Mosul last year were reported in the Australian media and seemed to hint at the complexity of Iraq’s cosmopolitan society. This paper seeks to compare and contrast the representation of these events in four of Australia’s leading newspapers (The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) by using a multi-methodological approach. The analysis reveals that Australian print coverage falls short of detailing the complexities of Iraq’s cosmopolitan society and therefore engenders an Orientalist (Said, 1978) discourse that constructs the Assyrians as powerless and anonymous victims.

The rise of the Anglican orthodox church in Solomon Islands

 This research examines an Anglican schism in Melanesia which led to the rise of a new church and argues that the new church was a response to the fundamental importance of territory. The result is a new social formation called the segmentary church society.